


I Don't Know What More to Ask For

by halotolerant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, M/M, Sex is Alarming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:23:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Reichenbach Fall.</p><p>'And now that, once more, he does not have John Watson the situation has arguably only returned – after six hundred and two days of abnormality – to a resting state.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Don't Know What More to Ask For

\- - -

Thank you to elfwhistletree for beta

\- - -

 

Imagine having John Watson.

Sherlock would never have dreamed of it. Even if he’d ever been given to the kind of unproductive, pointless fantasising characteristic of Normal, even given what he knew – what he thought he knew – of his own needs and desires (and for certain no one else knew them), he’d never have thought of John Watson.

Before this present time, there were a very great number of years when he did not have John Watson.

And this was not something that troubled or occupied him in any way. He did not sit in the evenings and feel any particular thing to be missing, or turn to speak to any particular person, or ever stop still anywhere, like in the middle of an echoing _Carrefour Hypermarché_ near Toulouse at 3am, and stare at a shelf groaning with a certain flavour of quiche and become subject to associative memories falling inexorably as dominoes.

And now that, once more, he does not have John Watson the situation has arguably only returned – after six hundred and two days of abnormality – to a resting state.

It should be exactly the same as before.

But it is not the same.

 _Loss_ emerges to be tangibly different from never-having-possessed, even though logically the reasons for this are scarce.

Humanity, perhaps, makes the margin of error, as so often.

Sherlock never asked to be human, little reverse Pinocchio that he was. But it would seem in this case that nature wins out over any amount of nurture. Or – indeed - lack of it.

Sherlock puts a fifth chocolate gateau in his wire shopping basket; it is too full now, and hanging awkwardly on his arm, the corners digging into his skin with a soothing focus of pain. Although the serotonin-aping effects of chocolate are the subject of much popular humour, they do in fact exist in demonstrable amounts, and will not impede his higher functions as would wine or other more powerful anxiolytics, which in any case he has no time to hunt down.

He could smoke. He could smoke as much he likes, now, just like he used to.

But thinking of it – thinking of it is like pressing a thumb to a bruise. And this is irrational and illogical and foolish (John thinks he is dead, he is not going to know from across the Channel if Sherlock buys cigarettes), but he cannot afford to wrestle the strange, heavy, sore feeling just now.

He feels – the irony does not escape him – he feels as if he has fallen a long way, and as if when it finished the area roughly above his heart bruised first and worst of all.

Sherlock becomes aware that his hands are cold, and they shake, and his pulse is moving the skin of his neck – his systolic blood pressure must be in the region of 190mmHg. Within tolerances but not to be encouraged.

From a moment just before ascending to the Bart’s rooftop, until this moment now, he has been ignoring his body. Once that was possible even for weeks, but he has managed it in this case for just under two days. He cannot recall any distinct sensation since the first press of his foot on the roof. Not during the deftly executed switch with the stolen corpse, not when running downstairs, donning the disguise, the tube journey to St Pancras, the Eurostar, the connecting train or walking into this place to buy his first meal since he left London. He does not feel hunger now. He just wants to silence his mind, for once, to lag it, block it up, clog it with cake.  

‘Eating your sorrow’ they say – but why sorrow? And why does it feel like this? What possibly evolutionary use is all this shivering?

The sleepy teenager at the tills, who doesn’t know yet that she’s pregnant and hates the father, looks up at him and frowns: “Vous allez bien?Vous êtes souffrant?”

What does it matter to her if he is well? Why bother to ask?

He is still himself - he still doesn’t understand this, he still doesn’t wish to ascribe to her any kind of value or praise because she demonstrates empathy and concern.

And yet here he is, fracturing in front of her, shaking his head quickly and paying with cash curled in cold fingers. She can see something in him that he cannot recognise in himself – she has access like all the other Normals to some ridiculous intuitive process that is weak and deceptive and _better_ than him at this.

Pain is bad. Fundamentally true. Except that isn’t true at all – pain is useful, pain protects us. Pain teaches anything from a rat upwards to avoid that which gives pain.

Sherlock pauses in the huge sliding doors, looking out at the dark car-park, at asphalt stretching away, empty.

How would he feel if believed John to be dead? If there was within this feeling of loss no margin for that breed of doubt dignified by the name ‘hope’?

He does not have John Watson and that creates certain emotional reactions - this is hard to accept but at least intelligible: He is used to eating breakfast with another person, they are useful for fetching forgotten marmalade and so forth – it _can_ be rationalised.

But the other half of the implication is that John Watson does not have him.

Many people do not have Sherlock Holmes. Many people have expressed strong feelings regarding gratitude for this state of being.

But nonetheless, it hurts John. It is hurting John.

Sherlock is hurting John.

(John’s voice through the phone; thin, fading, bruising.)

It was the only possible action he could have taken, so it is entirely illogical to feel anything. Except, possibly, pride for saving John’s life.

But pride is not what Sherlock is feeling.

\- - -

“Because he wants to be in contact with him one last time before he dies,” John had explained, patiently. Early days at Baker Street, DVDs and curry and three hundred boxes of clotted-cream fudge for experimental purposes stacked around them. “Spock is a touch telepath, remember?”

“But they can’t touch – the glass is in the way. If he were to be actually touching him, it would mean they would both die, so neither of them should want it.”

“They want to show each other that they want to try.”

“That’s ridiculous. And you told me Spock didn’t have emotions.”

“I said he tried not to have them. Kirk is his exception. And tribbles – oh, I’ll show you one day.”

Sherlock had frowned, slightly uncertain of his ground. “Why is Kirk his exception?”

“Because Kirk’s lucky, I suppose.” John sighed. “This was my favourite movie when I was a teenager, and I never really thought about why.”

“Why, then?”

John blinked. “The bagpipes, obviously. Here they come.” And he unpaused the screen and they watched to the end, and then John changed the disc to something unenlightening about gangsters and a stolen painting. Sherlock solved the case before anyone had even got shot.

\- - -

The hardback with the torn cover, from the rambling second-hand dealer in Geneva, which he had to shoplift because it would have been insufferable to be seen buying it, says on the endpaper that it covers all kinds of grief for any form of loss.

It says: ‘Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.’

It does not say ‘Regret’, or anything about how to get rid of it.

But how can anything as stupid and huge and formless as emotion be tied down into words? How can anyone tame it into a little graph, if Sherlock Holmes can’t?

(He never wanted to. He never wanted this. He never imagined it because he did not want to be here.)

“C’est dangereux, idiot!” someone yells at him, when he throws the book out of the train window, and then, “Ne mettez pas les pieds sur le siège!” as he curls his knees up under his chin, hugging his last box of cake to his chest, and stares out at the view of bleak, brown fields rumbling past.

Another word is muttered, a piece of slang Sherlock doesn’t know, but can guess easily enough – _Freak_ is all about the tone of voice, anyway.

\- - -

Imagine having John Watson.

Don’t imagine it. Either he’s there and it’s not necessary...

...or he’s not and this will hurt you.

\- - -

The elegantly dressed young man who leads him to the vault in the bowels of the Swiss bank explains that the message he telephoned through two weeks earlier has been written out and placed inside his safe-deposit box as instructed.

Sherlock doesn’t say: _What message?_

He waits for the box to open.

Moriarty _is_ dead.

He believes Moriarty is dead.

(John believes Sherlock is dead)

The message is written on headed notepaper in blue biro by a staff-member whose first written script was South Korean and who is suffering with the earliest stages of carpal tunnel disease in the dominant hand.

Reading it, he can almost see the umbrella moving, steady as a metronome.

 _I think five years would be an advisable minimum. Under no circumstances phone._

Sherlock counts quickly – the amount of money in the deposit box has been approximately doubled.

 He puts it all back, closes the box and walks away.

It occurs to him now to wonder, if emotion was so unimportant to both of them, why they ever thought they were arguing.

\- - -

Mycroft understood about the noise, the noise of all the things happening, of words and sights and smells, the endless stream of things-that-are-so.

“Data,” Mycroft said. He was ten, Sherlock was four. “Not ‘things’.”

Mycroft was not concerned by the noise. Not by anything.

“He’s dead,” Mycroft said.

Sherlock had been stacking bricks – if you had a brick it was a cube and that was one brick, if you made another cube you needed eight bricks, but each side showed four bricks and only two bricks touched each given side, so if you only knew the side number you could figure out how many were there altogether.

Three bricks along the side should mean that you had twenty-seven to make another symmetrical cube – Sherlock was trying to verify this when Mycroft interrupted him.

“You can do that faster if you use the computer – I’ll show you,” Mycroft said, and helped him stand up off the floor and then stepped away. “Father’s dead, Sherlock.”

Sherlock stood on one leg. Balancing helped his brain quieten – he spent most of his early years walking everywhere on his tip-toes.

“What does ‘dead’ mean?”

“It means finished. No more.”

“Oh.” Sherlock blinked. “Mother will be sad.”

Mycroft frowned. “Mother is sad anyway. Mother is sad all the time, it doesn’t matter what anyone does. But that’s not our fault because it is very illogical behaviour.”

Sherlock nodded, and did a cartwheel in case everything in his head would settle like his inner ear. “Why is Father dead?”

“Because he shot himself.”

“Why did he do that?”

Mycroft didn’t answer straightaway, which disturbed Sherlock more than any of the conversation that had gone before, so he leapt to fill the gap. “Was it very illogical behaviour?”

Mycroft nodded, and straightened both their ties. “Yes, very. Turn on the computer and I’ll show you the bricks.”

There’s never been any more conversation about it since. The things Sherlock thinks he might remember – the things he might have observed deep in the fog of infancy – may well be dreams.

He has no memory of his father at all. He knows he will never have the tools to ask whether he kept away from them, or whether Mycroft kept them away from him.

Sherlock has told John parts of the story, not these parts but a little. He hadn’t realised he was capable of speaking of it at all, or that anyone would be capable of hearing him.

\- - -

In Stuttgart, in a small 24 hour convenience shop with a more exotic array of porn than he’s ever encountered outside of a dedicated sex district, Sherlock finds himself at eye level with another broccoli quiche.

John would not be pleased to be remembered by broccoli quiche, he thinks, and sees a flash of half-remembered, half-extrapolated expression - the pursing of his lips, the rolling eyes - and smiles.

Whatever it is that is hurting, hurts more after that.

He buys a pre-packed tuna salad, three chocolate bars, a magazine that promises to feature collections of mature women having sex in trucks, and a large packet of cigarettes.

He spends the night making aeroplanes out of the glossy photographs and perfecting a method to launch them out of his hotel room with a lighted cigarette balanced in the middle, so that they suddenly burn up in mid-air.

He smokes the other half of the packet, because apparently he’s only human.

It doesn’t help in any way whatsoever.

\- - -

Once, fearing that he was watching John walk away from him, he’d had an idea.

Would this now be easier or harder, if John had agreed to his suggestion?

Would Sherlock, perhaps, feel relief to get away from something he might well have found he didn’t like?

Would John hurt less? Impossible to predict. Far outside any point of reference Sherlock has on file.

Which had been the problem, really.

“Would it help?” he’d asked, stepping into John’s bedroom at the pub in Dartmoor.

John had been lying across the bed on his stomach, scribbling in his notebook, probably the last of his notes on the H.O.U.N.D. case. He’d looked up, blinking with confusion that was at least sixty percent affected; John is not even a common or garden genius, but it has been over eight months now since anything Sherlock has done has really surprised him.

(Even this last. It was many things but not a surprise. John had known – would not have rushed back in the taxi if he hadn’t _known_...

John has always had an astonishing capacity for acceptance. Sometimes Sherlock has pushed at it on purpose, just to see, but John just blinks and gives a little more.

Not now. Not this. Too far. Surely?)

“For the benefit of those of us not present when this conversation began,” John had said slowly, (it helps, thinking of John, and also it makes things worse, but the past is better than the present), “define ‘it’ and possibly also define ‘help’ – although I’m not sure I want to know what you think that means.”

He’d raised himself off the bed as he spoke, twisting and shifting to sit upright, not making any effort to close the book or hide his writing.

“Sherlock?” John raised an eyebrow, head tilted to one side – a non-verbal communication common to many species, implying consideration.

“Would it help... this?” Sherlock had tried to explain, waving a hand between them.

(There just isn’t a _word_ for what they are to each other, nothing that makes sense to him. Nothing exclusive, specific, powerful enough.)

“Would it help if we were to have sex?”

John’s eyes widened and he cast a quick glance downwards to his right – indicative of his brain constructing an image, and it seemed to unsettle him, because as he met Sherlock’s gaze again his fists clenched, nails digging into the thenar eminences.

“On reflection, I’m going to need that definition of ‘help’, Sherlock.”

Sherlock had frowned. He was confident that John understood – or at least understood enough, was quite capable of making the leap of cognition – but apparently John was going to require vocalisation anyway, which would be boring and annoying and uncomfortable.

Normally, John made things easier. That was the purpose of John.

Sherlock’s world is very noisy and very busy and there is too much of it, except when there is nothing like enough, because when you understand things you see how unspeakably _dull_ almost everything is, dull and repetitive, stupid and pointless, only occasionally rising accidentally to interest, like a wrinkle in a beige carpet.

John altered none of that. Being with him, talking to him, paying some form of consistent attention to him that more or less warrants the label ‘friendship’, at least to translate it to idiot-speak, should for no logical reason have made things slightly quieter or slightly calmer, certainly shouldn’t have made being bored slightly less painful, but however improbable, Sherlock has been forced to call it the truth.

And then, with one sentence, one snapped set of words, he’d hurt John. Not much, not by the scale of what he would go on to do, but neither of them had guessed that then.

(He should have guessed. Mycroft knew. He should have _known_ Mycroft knew something. He should have been more excellent than this.)

He’d watched John’s anger, watched John walking away from him, visibly distressed and it had been unpleasant. Not the fear from the drug – not the primal, pulse-pounding fear with attendant actions of the sympathetic nervous system. A deeper, colder fear, horrible in a unique manner.

John walking away from him had made him feel powerless.

He’d been hard pressed to think of a worse sensation.

(John refuses to lose faith in him now. It’s on his blog, which Sherlock should not have visited, but half the world has so what’s one IP address in Germany here or there? It was in his words, on the phone, at the end. In his eyes, all the time, even when Sherlock found a tiny part of himself doubting, using words like ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, pointing out that this would not be the first time genius had emerged flawed and bewildered to another reality altogether.

John refuses to lose faith in him now, and that gives Sherlock a feeling of more than power, of buoyancy, as if his limbs float. And then it hurts.

He would have said that deriving worth from another person’s regard was ridiculous. Still would. How ridiculous he is.)

“During this case,” he’d said, then, slowly, reaching to pull his collar up before noticing that John was watching him do it and stopping. “We have been... at odds. There is not a vocabulary between us that makes resolving these issues straightforward. I understand that forms of touching, including sexual intercourse, are frequently important in the resolution of disputes, not just in humans but several other primates. Also, many people assume that we are in a sexual relationship, which is of course partly mere prurience, but may also reflect that we exist in a category of interaction where it would be in some sense desirable.”

He’d begun pacing, because walking on one’s toes really seemed to unnerve people to a disproportionate degree, and because it’s easier to talk fast when moving. He’d been aware of his skin prickling under his coat – a heat flush, denoting embarrassment, even though he’d thought about the issue for three hours and seventeen minutes and it was rational to raise the point.

John sat on the edge of the bed, and watched him in silence.

Sherlock had several theories about how John might respond. He was, after all, much less conventional than people seemed to assume. His girlfriends, after all (how pointless a phrase is ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend’ if it can mean ‘someone who doesn’t know you at all’?) had all believed him to be ‘sweet’ and had written emails to this effect.

Not ‘sweet’, certainly. Not salty, either, nothing so obvious. Something subtle but strange and strong. Cardamom, perhaps.

And that was whimsical. He was not used to being attacked by the whimsical.

That was what John was for.

(That was a part – a small part – of what John has done to him.)

“Sherlock,” John was saying slowly. “If you’ve decided the time has come to experiment, no worries, go for it, but don’t ask me.”

“You are not averse to homosexual practices as a concept. You have been aroused in my presence on at least five occasions. Why are you objecting? And this is not an experiment – one test subject would be totally inadequate if it were.”

John had run a hand over his face and groaned.

Sherlock has never cared, especially, if he was considered attractive, except in as much as it was a useful method of manipulation in certain cases. But data had suggested that it would be statistically unlikely for John to regard him as unappealing.

Of course, most people who know Sherlock find him unappealing for reasons besides the physical, and reject him, as Normals will when overawed.

But John had not done that.

“I’m not gay, Sherlock.”

“That is not the question under consideration. I’m wondering if you and I would,” he paused, gritted his teeth – it was a stupid, over-used word, but it would do – “if we would _communicate_ better in certain matters through physical means.”

John stood up and walked purposefully toward him. Sherlock drew himself up and swallowed. He had brought condoms and lubricant in his coat pocket – one has to assume one will win every argument.

He’d thought that the flicker in the pit of his stomach might be whatever arousal felt like. Very definitely not fear.

(Could anything be so terrible? It would have given John a part of him that no one else had, and that might be some kind of comfort now, perhaps, to John at least.)

“Yes, because you are so fluent in physical communication,” John had said, stopping about a foot away from him, and talking _softly_. “Yes, alright, I agree, when couples fight, sex is often a part of the reconciliation process, but Sherlock, we’re not a couple and you think of sex the way most people think about second-hand embalming fluid.”

Sherlock met his gaze. The eyes do not in fact express any form of personality, they are just large light-gathering dishes frequently used in non-verbal communication and endowed through years of culture as somehow disclosing a soul peering forth, but John’s eyes were always very, very... John.

“But you weren’t thinking about sex. You were thinking about me,” John said slowly. He sounded almost surprised. His eyes were very wide. Pupils not dilated, but it was a bright room.

Sherlock found that his mouth was dry, his tongue dragging against the roof of his mouth. “I have already demonstrated my weakness as regards the importance I place on your good opinion of me. Mutual naked behaviours are little enough after that.”

John grinned. “I’d make a joke about dinner and a movie but you – yes, like that, that expression you’re making now - you don’t think it’s funny and you’re disappointed that I’m predictable.”

“I didn’t know if you’d say yes. But you usually say yes. Eventually.” Sherlock rallied himself, stepped forward a little, reached out – touching the inside of a person’s wrist is a key indicator of a wish for intercourse with them and if permitted usually suggests the permission, ultimately, of that act – and drew a smile onto his face that he observed once in a very interesting bar in Soho. “Say yes to me, John.”

John leapt back so fast that the nail of Sherlock’s right index finger left a deep, red scratch on his skin.

 “Don’t be someone else!” John shouted at him, not seeming to notice the wound, holding his arms up in self-defence. “Oh you are _not_ road-testing this on me. I can’t stand it when you aren’t _you_ around me – don’t tell me this isn’t you. You’re just practising, aren’t you? Oh fuck.”

Sherlock’s heart was beating at between 105 to 110 per minute. “I don’t know who _I_ am for this,” he pointed out. “None of this is me.”

John’s breathing was levelling out, his arms going down. Slowly, the muscles in his face relaxed from grimace to concern. “Leaving everything else aside – and there is a lot of everything else, by the way – I don’t want to have sex with someone who doesn’t think they’ll enjoy it.”

“I don’t know if I could enjoy sex. I like the idea of having another kind of hold on you.”

John gaped at him.

“I don’t want you to leave, alright? Now, see, this is what I mean. _Nothing_ can be as awful as having to say those words.”

Just like that, John was grinning at him again. “Sherlock, you’re the most important person in my life – ask any of my ex-girlfriends. Not having sex with you isn’t going to change that.”

“Harry’s important to you. You never see her. She disappointed you.”

“Yeah, well, now I’m definitely in the mood. Thanks. Can we just...” John closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stem a headache – talking about his sister always triggered the same ritual – “Can you go now and can we pretend this didn’t happen, as juvenile as that is?”

“I tell you, I can do this.”

John closed his eyes for a moment. “Forget the sex.”

And before Sherlock could quite identify the several feelings that sentence induced, John continued. “Can you even hug me?”

“Is that an essential precursor?”

“No, but it’s a relatively safe test that I don’t think either of will regret as much as what you’re suggesting.”

John was standing there, arms open in a gesture that was almost parody.

Sherlock felt something flicker up his skin. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, but it was interesting, rather like the time he’d accidentally stuck his hand in slow-lime.

He stepped forward, opening his arms in a mirror. John held him for a moment.

It felt extremely odd.

“See,” John was saying, stepping back. “Shall we leave it there?”

“I didn’t hate it,” Sherlock had said, softly.

He ran over the moment again, and again, and once more, cataloguing.

“I didn’t hate it. That’s interesting.”

“You find sex alarming.”

“I find people alarming. Not you. People.”

“You know, when you try, sometimes you can do the verbal communication thing OK.”

Sherlock looked at him, at the gentle smile, at the way his pulse beat in his neck, at the slight flush in his cheeks: “You’re scared. You’re alarmed by sex. By sex with me.”

John blinked for a moment, and then nodded, looking away: “For many, many good reasons.”

“Does the idea of being ‘gay’ bother you so very much?”

John looked up at him. “Some of us are not as good at being noticeable as you are. I don’t like... I don’t like people looking at me, Sherlock.”

“I look at you. I see everything.”

“Not you. People.” John gave him the softest smile yet. “Shall we leave it at that and get a bloody drink?”

And they had, and honestly Sherlock is glad, because it still seems... He still can’t imagine any part of the sexual act happily, with anything other than trepidation.

But being held. Holding. He hadn’t hated it.

He’d never experienced as strong a longing to touch anyone, as he had when John had been standing down there below him, breaking.

\- - -

It is all hanging, unfinished, unanswered. Caught mid-fall, never to land, never to know.

In Prague, Sherlock stays in his bed for three days and doesn’t eat. This is slightly more deadening than anything else he’s tried.

But he can hear John, in his head, sighing.

Imagine having John Watson. You’d never forget it, not really.

He steals a laptop and downloads ‘The Search for Spock’, which Wikipedia tells him comes after the travesty of biogenetics science he watched with John, and maybe it’s just having eaten a sausage roll on an empty stomach, but at the end he vomits, his whole body jack-knifing.

\- - -

Forget five years, barely three months have passed.

Probably Mycroft knows he’s in the country. He won’t approach him. Mycroft makes a better fake at a Normal than he does, but there’s less of him underneath. Something ate it, a long time ago, and with Sherlock he’s tried his best, Sherlock can see that at least.

He spends seventeen days waiting in the graveyard, before he sees him.

It had occurred to him (that illogical tendency dignified with the name ‘hope’) that John would be... settled, somehow. With someone, perhaps. Angry maybe – convinced at last by Lestrade or somebody.

It’s a long away across the lawn, and not something Sherlock’s ever been very good at noticing, but he can tell how John is feeling.

He can _feel_ how John is feeling.

 _If he were to be actually touching him, it would mean they would both die, so neither of them should want it._

Imagine having John Watson. Sherlock does, now, almost all the time, can’t get clean of it.

He’ll crack soon. He will. Foolish and weak and desperately illogical but he’ll go to him, he’ll go to John, because that’s what John has done to him, or possibly what he has done to John.

And the stupidest thing is, the idea makes him so damn _happy_.

\- - -

 


End file.
